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Tribal Nations and the Other Territories of American Indian Literary History
American Indian individuals, communities, and tribal nations have always lived within and generated Native contexts: intellectual, political, historical, national, territorial, and cultural. When Europeans, Africans, and others arrived, their presence changed these contexts, often quickly and dramatically, but did not eliminate or otherwise prevent the continued production of tribal nation-specific contexts. Whether they were shooting at squatters or signing treaties, sitting for a portrait by George Catlin or posing for a photograph by Edward Curtis, arguing before a tribal council or lobbying Congress, telling a story to an ethnographer or writing their own, American Indians continued to view the world on their own terms. The US contexts of American Indian literatures are more familiar and recognizable to most scholars of US literatures, but the indigenous contexts are operative as well. As Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks demonstrates so vividly in her work on Mary Rowlandson, these indigenous contexts also shape European immigrant writing in the Americas but remain underexamined. Attention to such contexts enriches our understanding of the strategies that American Indians developed to resist and accommodate colonial and settler-colonial incursions, as well as our understanding of the trajectories of American Indian and US literary histories. Attention to tribal nation-specific rather than pan-indigenous contexts recognizes the many distinct histories in Indian country and foregrounds the enduring daily struggle within those nations to limit US intrusions into their affairs and fortify their sovereignty. This chapter urges a more substantial regard for specific tribal nation contexts by establishing their importance for reading three major American Indian writers of the mid-twentieth century.
The three authors under primary consideration in this chapter were born citizens of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory prior to Oklahoma statehood in 1907. They traveled throughout the United States, western hemisphere, and globe and wrote about these places from within their own tribal nation perspectives. Short story writer and novelist John Milton Oskison, who also served in editorial roles at the New York Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly, earns mention in some studies of American Indian literature, but he remains a peripheral figure in the field. Some scholars express particular concern about his apparently assimilationist politics. A tribal nation reading of his Indian Territory novel Black Jack Davy (1926) reveals a celebration of the Cherokee outlaw-hero Ned Christie as well as what Cherokee scholar Kirby Brown identifies as a defense of Cherokee Nation property laws. Lynn Riggs is the prolific playwright and author of Green Grow the Lilacs (1930), the source play for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943). Scholars tend to lament the despair for a Cherokee future expressed in The Cherokee Night (1936) or the silence on Cherokee-specific issues in his other plays. Riggs has experienced a mini-renaissance in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Though critics increasingly recognize the Cherokee contexts of his Indian Territory plays, we have not turned to his Mexico plays, including The Year of Pilár (c. 1935–8). When read within the context of the place that Mexico holds in Cherokee history, the Mayan revolution that Riggs stages in the play speaks more clearly than any of his other plays to a hopeful Cherokee future. The Cherokee contexts that inform the writing of Will Rogers, one of the most famous celebrities in the world in the 1920s and 1930s, have only recently drawn the attention of scholars such as Amy Ware and Tol Foster (Muscogee Creek). Rogers consistently asserts throughout his writings a subjectivity embedded in a Cherokee national context. In the correspondence gathered in Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President (1926), these assertions demonstrate the committed effort he makes to validate Cherokee national history on a global stage. The final section retains this focus on the international movement of indigenous Americans by considering a novel, Confederated Salish and Kootenai author D’Arcy McNickle’s Runner in the Sun (1954), that emerges from intertribal, hemispheric contexts. The novel and the contexts that inform its production challenge the political and geographic orientations of tribal nation as well as hemispheric and transnational critical practices.
A shift in American Indian literary studies in the second half of the 1990s from a critical focus on identity, culture, and representation to tribal nation-specific histories, writing traditions, and politics dramatically reoriented the field and expanded its focus. Prior to the era initiated by Osage scholar Robert Warrior’s Tribal Secrets (1995), concerns about identity, culture, and representation dominated discussions of American Indian literatures as well as Indians in literature. Scholars asked, what do representations of Indians – noble, savage, vanished – tell us about the formation of US national identities and cultural imaginaries? How did early immigrant English writers represent Indians to enable and justify colonial violence? How did American Indian writers subvert or reify these representations? Representations of Indians permeate US culture, and powerful discourses that define Indian authenticity circulate throughout popular and mass culture as well as the fields of literature, law, and politics. The critical assessment of the correlation between literary representations of Indians and colonial or federal Indian policies, therefore, as in Lucy Maddox’s groundbreaking Removals (1991), is crucial to identifying the direct role that US literatures play in settler-colonial expansion and the attendant, enduring violation of the human and civil rights of American Indians.
The dominant focus on these issues, however, foregrounds Europe and the United States at the expense of indigenous contexts and draws scholars into distracting debates about who is and who is not an Indian, about what is and what is not American Indian literature. Warrior observes,
Both American Indian and Native Americanist discourses continue to be preoccupied with parochial questions of identity and authenticity. Essentialist categories still reign insofar as more of the focus of scholarship has been to reduce, constrain, and contain American Indian literature and thought and to establish why something or someone is ‘Indian’ than engage the myriad critical issues crucial to an Indian future. (Tribal Secrets xix)
Instead, Tribal Secrets and scholarship by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux), Jace Weaver (Cherokee), and Craig Womack (Muskogee Creek) situate literary theory in not only American Indian cultural but also intellectual, political, historical, and tribal national contexts. This chapter owes an abiding debt to tribal nation-specific inquiry as practiced by Brooks and Womack and an even greater debt to Daniel Justice (Cherokee) and his Cherokee-specific study, Our Fire Survives the Storm (2006). The work of these scholars and many others encourages both the reassessment of texts familiar to us through primarily cultural interpretations and the recovery of texts that failed the authentic culture test. The sites of inquiry in the field, therefore, have multiplied exponentially.
The mid-twentieth century, for example, has long appeared as a lacuna between the Progressive and Civil Rights eras on the timeline of American Indian literary history. However, there is an astonishing amount of writing, much of it extraordinarily popular, by American Indians between 1920 and 1960. From the perspective of scholarship focused on identity and culture, most of these writers do not register as Indians. Even if a scholar identifies them as Indians or as people with Indian heritage, these writers are neither racially authentic nor culturally traditional, and, therefore, not real enough to earn serious critical consideration. The historical and political orientation of tribal nation-specific critical practices, however, places the identification of American Indians in the hands of families, histories, and tribal national governments, which have the sovereign right to define tribal national citizenship. The authors under consideration in this chapter were born citizens of their tribal nations; they are Cherokee nationals contributing to a Cherokee national literature. The shift in focus from identity and culture to history and politics, and a particular recognition of the sovereign if also domestic dependent status of tribal nations, helps to reveal the mid-twentieth century as a major rather than nearly dormant period in American Indian literary history. Oskison, Riggs, and Rogers are only three of the many writers from this period awaiting reintroduction to American Indian and US literary history.
The Territories of Tribal Nation Writing
John Milton Oskison, William Penn Adair Rogers, and Rollie Lynn Riggs were born in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, in 1874, 1879, and 1899, respectively. All three experienced in their early lives the disruption of a national Cherokee history by the allotment of tribally owned lands and Oklahoma statehood. Oskison explores this history in three novels in which he punctuates narratives of national continuity with moments of outrage at the losses sustained. Riggs characterizes the legacy of this history in his Indian Territory plays as primarily traumatic, though he finds a revolutionary Indian territory in Mexico that promises a more optimistic future for Cherokees. Rogers consistently grounds his observations about corrupt, incompetent, and meddling governments across the globe in his own history in the Cherokee Nation. The work of these writers shows Cherokee contexts mapped onto tribal nation, Indian Territory, settler-colonial, and international contexts.
The transformation of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory by non-Native immigration in the 1890s is the core concern of Oskison’s second novel, Black Jack Davy, and a conflict over ownership of the land dominates the plot. Though Oskison identifies the setting as Indian Territory, he characterizes this entire region as legally and historically Cherokee. This Cherokee Nation fills Indian Territory; Cherokee-specific contexts overflow tribal national borders. On a local, northeastern Oklahoma level, this strategy is an act of appropriation. On a US national scale, it is an assertion of land rights for all tribal nations in the territory.
The border crossing on the novel’s opening page moves US readers into a foreign territory. When he crosses the Six Bulls River, which runs through Cherokee land, the protagonist, “Black Jack” Davy Dawes, “felt quite cut off from the old life” (1). Davy, who takes his nickname from the famous ballad, is traveling with his foster parents, Jim and Mirabelle Dawes. They have leased land from Ned Warrior, a “full-blood” who lives with his younger companion, Rose Lamedeer, and their infant (19). During a quick visit to their neighbors, Davy’s Uncle Josephus, Aunt Elizabeth, and Cousin Mary, we learn from the family friend Judge Pease that “bad men from the whole United States are flocking into Indian country” (17). The main villains are Jerry Boyd, who calls himself an Indian Territory “old-timer”; his son Cale; and the bandit Jack Kitchin (3). Boyd arrived in Indian Territory 20 years previously running a medicine show, then stayed after he married Jennie Roberts, “daughter of old ‘Soggy’ Roberts, second chief of the tribe” (24). The marriage to a tribal nation citizen allows Boyd to start ranching. By the time the novel begins, he has expanded onto farms to either side of his own land. Mary explains to her cousin Davy, “Folks say … Mr. Boyd wants to get hold of all this land between the river and Horsepen creek – more than three thousand acres. He got mad when Ned came in and he and papa made their bargain” (19). Like the Six Bulls River, Horsepen Creek is in Cherokee territory; it runs north and west of Claremore. Throughout the course of the novel, Ned Warrior and the Dawes family defeat all of Boyd’s schemes.
The catalog of Boyd’s criminal activities includes many of the strategies for dispossession long used against American Indians by non-Natives and the US government. As Boyd begins to plot against Warrior, he thinks, “First, he must get rid of Ned Warrior; and he believed that he could accomplish the Indian’s removal soon and with no peril to himself” (61). Oskison’s use of “removal” situates Boyd’s criminal enterprise in a long Cherokee and American Indian history of dispossession. Boyd tries to convince Warrior to sell his land, and, when Warrior refuses, he sends the sheriff to arrest Warrior for shooting a deputy marshall named Burke. Once the sheriff reluctantly arrests Warrior, Boyd sends an ally, Ben Stannard, to remove Rose and occupy Warrior’s house and land. Then, in an attempt to run Uncle Josephus’s family from the plot of land that they lease from Warrior, he plans to set fire to their home and barn. With the help of Kitchin, Boyd eventually succeeds in setting Uncle Josephus’s barn on fire and laying siege to the Dawes home.
Yet Oskison interrupts this familiar history and plot of Cherokee dispossession: Ned Warrior gains his release from jail just in time to stop Boyd. “Ned had his own private war to wage,” writes Oskison before providing a glimpse into Warrior’s mind:
Shaken by a silent, passionate rage, not merely against Cale, but all such scum from the white man’s world as were riding this night against his friends, Ned understood better than ever before why old Running Rabbit and his fellow full-bloods of the hill country met in secret councils and planned to drive out the aliens and close the borders to them. If only they could! (271–2)
Ned Warrior decides against running to the hills to fight a guerilla war. Though the odds appear unfavorable, Ned Warrior chooses direct confrontation or what Daniel Justice calls the Chickamauga path of defiance:
Of course, there were many honest whites, good friends of the Indians and good neighbors. … But they appeared, sometimes, to be a helpless minority. They seemed to count for so little compared with the horde of lawless invaders, the whiskey peddlers, cattle thieves, store thieves, train robbers, greed-crazed land grabbers like Jerry Boyd. (272)
In his first novel, Wild Harvest (1925), Oskison focuses primarily on the “honest whites,” but his readers will not have a full picture of his conception of Indian Territory without reading Black Jack Davy. They are companion novels in which the honest white characters of the first, such as the cowboys Gabe Horner and Tom Winger, appear in the second novel but with much less social and political influence.
Oskison situates his revision of popular plots about doomed Cherokees in a local history familiar to many readers in and around the Cherokee Nation. Ned Warrior is a reimagined Ned Christie, the famous Cherokee leader who in 1887 was accused of a murder that he did not commit. The full-bloods in the hills to whom Warrior’s thoughts turn are the Keetowahs, the community of Cherokees that Robert Conley describes as traditionals devoted to preserving Cherokee culture, opposing slavery, and resisting allotment. According to Conley, Ned Christie was a Keetowah born in 1852 in the Rabbit Trap community of the Cherokee Nation (Encyclopedia 65). As an elected member of the Cherokee National Council, Christie “was an outspoken proponent of Cherokee sovereignty” (Encyclopedia 65). Authorities tried to arrest him after he was accused of killing Deputy US Marshall Dan Maples. The first attempt ended with Christie’s house on fire, and he caught a bullet in his right eye. As subsequent attempts also failed, Conley relates, Christie was accused of many other crimes. In defense, he turned his house into what locals began to call Ned Christie’s fort. Conley describes the final assault on the fort:
They fired hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the house all day long and into the night. They also shot flaming dowel rods at the house in an attempt to set it on fire and fired a cannon until they split the barrel. … In the morning, they managed to plant some dynamite under a wall and blow it apart, setting the house on fire. When Ned came running out, he was killed by members of the posse. (Encyclopedia 66)
Many Cherokees regard Christie as a national hero: the official webpage of the Cherokee Nation calls him a “martyr and patriot” (“Ned Christie”). When the stage adaptation of the novel by Richard Mansfield Dickinson was performed in the late 1920s in Tulsa, Norman, and Vinita, Oklahoma, many members of the audience would have made the connection between Warrior and Christie.
The criminal charge against Warrior and the details of his battle to avoid arrest earlier in the novel correspond to the initial allegation that authorities made against Christie and his subsequent fight against them. The battle pits Warrior against Captain Black, a deputy marshall, and a posse. Black uses “an ancient three-pounder cannon” in the assault against Warrior’s cabin, which “resembled a fort” (112). When the use of the cannon does not lead to Warrior’s surrender, Black turns to dynamite:
Waiting until the first peep of dawn, he posted his men at the edge of the clearing with instructions to pour upon the door and window openings such a fire as the man in the cabin could not face; and with the opening bars of that mad movement, he ran to lay the sticks of explosive under the cabin wall and light the fuses. (115)
Warrior sustains multiple wounds, but Oskison revises Ned Christie’s history: Warrior survives the attack, helps the Dawes family break Boyd and Kitchin’s siege of their home, and then marries Rose. “On a clean slate,” Oskison explains, “Ned proposed to write a story of quiet happiness” (305). Oskison connects the Indian Territory of Black Jack Davy to Wild Harvest when many of the characters from the first novel appear at the end to assure Warrior’s self-authored quiet happiness by killing or arresting the surviving members of Kitchin’s gang.
Oskison pairs the revision of Ned Christie’s history with Cherokee-specific commentary on the largest land run in US history. The Cherokees owned millions of acres of land west of the Nation. The land, guaranteed by the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, was called the Cherokee Outlet. Following the Civil War, the Nation was forced to cede part of the Outlet and to accept the settlement of other tribal nations in the eastern part of it. What remained of the Outlet was ceded to the United States in 1893. In a scene in which Oskison depicts the federal government distributing funds for the purchase of the Outlet, the “half-blood tribal chief” Ross Murray gives a speech condemning the history of treachery that led to this latest land cession (169). Oskison intrudes to connect this cession to another national loss, “the wholesale removal of the tribe from lands in Georgia and Tennessee coveted by the whites,” then describes the massive land run that followed the loss of the Outlet. Boyd’s attack on Warrior localizes the land run and establishes an analogy: Boyd is to Warrior as the Sooners are to Indian Territory. Careful attention to the tribal nation-specific details of this novel unmasks a narrative of Cherokee resistance. Oskison transforms Ned Christie, however, from a Cherokee hero to an Indian Territory hero. Warrior’s/Christie’s triumph over Boyd belongs to all tribal nations in the region.
Lynn Riggs also masks a Cherokee Nation geography in an Indian Territory setting. Riggs only identifies characters as Cherokees in The Cherokee Night and The Cream in the Well (1940), but other Indian Territory plays, including Big Lake (1927), Roadside (1930), and Green Grow the Lilacs, are Cherokee specific. The setting of Big Lake falls within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation immediately prior to its dissolution by Oklahoma statehood and, similarly to Claremore Mound in The Cherokee Night, evokes a land dispute between Cherokees and Osages that was settled in this case in favor of neither tribal nation. The play is set on the shores of Big Lake in the Coo-wee-scoo-wee district of the Cherokee Nation, now Rogers County, Oklahoma, and is, therefore, a description of life in the Cherokee Nation. Riggs also situates the action in Big Lake, as in the other Indian Territory plays, in a constellation of Cherokee Nation towns: Claremont (Claremore), Verdigree (Verdigris), Foyil, Sageeyah, Pryor Crick (Pryor Creek or Pryor), and Grand River. Riggs embeds the play’s plot in this Cherokee Nation landscape, in the histories of violence that shaped it, and in the disruption of Cherokee national life imminent in the play but already experienced by Riggs and the nation’s other citizens.
Indeed, Riggs consistently dramatizes throughout his career the legacy of the European invasion of indigenous territories in plays such as Russet Mantle (1936), set in Santa Fe; Dark Encounter (1947), set on Cape Cod; and The Year of Pilár, set in a Mayan region of Yucatán, Mexico. While a Cherokee-specific reading of Russet and Dark would be challenging, The Year of Pilár draws upon the powerful place that Mexico occupies in Cherokee history. In addition to their first contact with Spanish rather than English colonizers and the archaeological evidence of Mesoamerican influence on the US Southeast, Cherokees have accounts that they migrated from or through Mexico. In a history of his people published in 1921, Cherokee historian Emmet Starr explains,
The Cherokees most probably preceded by several hundred years the Muskogees in their exodus from Mexico and swung in a wider circle, crossing the Mississippi River many miles north of the mouth of the Missouri River as indicated by the mounds. … The Muskogees were probably driven out of Mexico by the Aztecs, Toltecs or some other of the northwestern tribal invasions of the ninth or preceding centuries. This is evidenced by the customs and devices that were long retained by the Creeks. (22)
Though Starr leaves room for doubt, he treats this account confidently as empirical history rather than legend or folklore. In his Cherokee national history, Robert Conley is less confident but still relates the story as significant to Cherokees.
These histories likely shaped Cherokee views of Mexico as a safe haven from English and US colonial violence. The story of the “Lost Cherokees,” as recorded by James Mooney, tells of a group of Cherokees that protested land cessions by leaving the Southeast for northern New Spain in 1721. Other Cherokees found them later living in a precolonial Cherokee world. Historian Dianna Everett cites a report of Cherokees visiting one of New Spain’s northern provinces, Texas, in 1807 and establishing a settlement there in independent Mexico in 1813. Other Cherokees followed in an attempt to move beyond the reach of the United States. Richard Fields, who Everett argues was a “red” or war chief, even led a delegation to Mexico City in December 1822. Fields hoped to establish an alliance with Mexico, but he returned to Texas in June 1823 without an agreement. While the Texas Cherokees negotiated with Mexico and eventually the Republic of Texas, Cherokee scholar Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., explains, John Ross in the Cherokee Nation in Georgia also attempted to make arrangements with Mexico to reserve land for the Cherokees. The famous inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, Sequoyah, also made a journey to Mexico at the end of his life in an attempt to find Cherokee relations living there. Littlefield describes a Cherokee delegation sent to Mexico in the early 1840s by the Old Settlers, under John Brown, and another larger delegation of Old Settler and Treaty Party Cherokees in 1845.
Several generations after Sequoyah and Brown, Mexico maintained its presence in the Cherokee political imaginary. When Cherokee citizens faced the allotment of their nation’s land base in the late nineteenth century, some of them looked to Mexico as a possible sanctuary. From 1895 to 1908, Indian Territory and Oklahoma newspapers reported on various plans by Cherokees led first by Bird Harris and then Redbird Smith to immigrate to Mexico. In 1910, Smith, the chief of the Nighthawk Keetowahs, “went to Mexico with a document dating from 1820 hoping to prove a claim to land under that government” (Conley, Cherokee Nation 203). The journey, an attempt to realize what Littlefield calls “the utopian dream of the Cherokee fullbloods,” was unsuccessful (404). Yet the journey made clear again that for some Cherokees, Mexico was a place associated not only with the histories of a precolonial and Spanish colonial era but also more specifically with resistance to colonialism. Riggs’s own frequent visits to Mexico in the 1930s, and perhaps his long relationship with the Mexican dramatist Enrique Gasque-Molina (Ramon Naya), confirmed for him this view of Mexico.
The Year of Pilár is a dramatization of an enervated colonial world collapsing under the weight of its inflexible, oppressive traditions. It tells the story of the Crespos, a wealthy criollo family that owns a hemp plantation in Yucatán but flees in 1917 during the Revolution. After living in New York for 20 years, Pilár, the Crespos’ oldest child, insists that the family now flee the corrupting influences of New York and return to its hacienda. She is surprised to learn too late that their return coincides with the institution of Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas’s agrarian reform measures. The Mayans in Pilár, though not as fully developed as the members of the Crespo family and as enigmatic as most of Riggs’s Cherokee characters, gain control of their present and future. Riggs stages the actual process of land redistribution in Yucatán and justifies the wrath of local Mayans who at the end of the play punish the hacendados for centuries of enslavement and torture. The play is a devastating critique of colonialism and an unequivocal assertion of the feasibility of decolonization: retribution against the settler-colonial land owners, the return of land to Indigenous people, and the first steps toward a return to self-government.
Pilár is the most explicit colonizer in the catalog of Riggs’s characters. Riggs describes her in the stage directions: “She is a vibrant girl, with the cool aristocratic authority and pride of years of privilege. Her mind has the keenness and the violence of her Conqueror forefathers; her emotions the fierce range that will devastate others – or herself” (8). Riggs emphasizes the Crespo family’s conquistador ethic, as captured in the image of Pilár’s keen and violent mind, by aligning the family with Porfirio Diaz, who visits the Crespo family and then requests that they allow Pilár to spend a week with him. Don Severo Crespo, the hacendado and family patriarch, agrees to send Pilár with Diaz. Diaz was the dictator of Mixtec and Spanish ancestry who ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1880 and from 1884 to 1911, and he gave his support to the hacendados, as well as to wealthy foreign investors and corporations, throughout his career. One of his more vicious acts was to quell a Yaqui rebellion in the late 1880s in Sonora by removing Yaquis to Yucatán and enslaving them on the haciendas. Like Indian Territory, Yucatán also has a history shaped by the arrival of indigenous people violently removed from their distant homelands.
Pilár, the family’s “stone post,” relentlessly enforces her conception of the dominant social, political, and racial status that the family’s history confers upon them. She stands for Spain, the mother country, as well as for the conquistador and his descendants. Pilár’s zealous, dictatorial Catholicism produces a toxic family dynamic that drives her younger sister, Graziela, into prostitution in Cuba. Her brother Fernando flees into the chicle forests to be a chiclero after he marries a woman from a family that does not satisfy Pilár’s moral and social standards. Her brother Trino also leaves the home to work in the fields with his Mayan half-brother, Beto, and live with him, perhaps incestuously, in his jacal. Her parents, Don Severo and Doña Candita, watch helplessly as Pilár destroys the family by trying to maintain the moral and social contours of the world that they inherited and perpetuated.
Intrafamily resistance to her comes primarily from Trino, short for Trinidad (Trinity), the most rebellious of the Crespo sons. When the family first arrives at the hacienda, Trino shakes hands with Beto. Pilár reacts violently: “You don’t give your hand to an Indian!” (17). Trino’s threatening gesture of friendship and brotherhood with an indigenous Mexican, his assault on colonial decorum, has its origins in a view of history that conflicts with Pilár’s. Trino provides the most explicit denunciation of this history:
My grandfather was a tyrant, an oppressor. It’s no wonder he was at home here. Slaves to command – to torture if it please him – forcing them to work like beasts to fill his own money-bags. Women slaves to enjoy at night. The rich gluttonous old Spanish bastard! It’s no wonder he was just like that with that old despot, Porfirio Diaz. (31–2)
The outrage that Trino has at the abuses of his ancestors and his immediate family, including the father that he shares with Beto, leads him to establish an alliance with his half-brother.
Beto is the dominant Mayan character in the play, and Riggs presents him as oppressed but dignified. When the scene shifts from New York to Yucatán, “a little band of Indians,” including Beto, awaits the arrival of the Crespos (12). Beto’s refusal to dance a jarana, to perform in red face, is an act of civil disobedience that foreshadows his role in the imminent social unrest. Riggs also depicts Beto as hardworking, philosophical, and immune, almost stoically so, to Trino’s outbursts of self-righteous anger. This representation of Mayans corresponds to Cárdenas’s own view. He shared with other Mexicans “the widespread belief in the legendary peaceful and hardworking qualities of the Maya” (Fallaw 13). Though the honorable Beto is Riggs’s representative Mayan, one of the omnipresent homicides of Riggs’s Indian Territory plays suggests that Mayans are prone to outbursts of violence: one Mayan character kills another with a machete for obediently playing a song demanded by Fernando. Riggs establishes this violence, though, as part of the colonial context: as with the Cherokees and Osages in his Indian Territory plays, the oppressive interference of outsiders forces indigenous people into violent conflict with each other.
Riggs suggests the possibility of an incestuous relationship between Beto and Trino that represents not the nadir of a corrupt colonial history but a promise of healing. In the two scenes that Riggs sets at Beto’s jacal, a stoic Beto and an outraged Trino discuss the region’s colonial history. When Trino’s mother and sister arrive to reclaim Trino as a part of the family, Pilár intuits what she thinks is an incestuous relationship. Though Trino explicitly denies it, the specter of incest allows Riggs to heighten Pilár’s sense of horror that she first expressed when Trino shook Beto’s hand. Beto and Trino’s father then arrives to relinquish his position as patriarch and claim Trino and Beto as his sons. Craig Womack observes, “One of Riggs’s themes is innocent youths in conflict with oppressive adults and restrictive social institutions that hold back natural and free impulses. Idealism, especially in youth, succumbs to convention” (299). The theme that Womack identifies in Riggs’s Indian Territory and US plays does not translate to the Mexican context, where social and political processes at work affirm Trino’s idealism.
While the aforementioned Mayan-against-Mayan violence mimics the Cherokee-against-Cherokee violence of The Cherokee Night, the Mayans in Pilár begin to direct their anger at the criollos. As the government begins the process of land redistribution, some Yucatecan Mayans begin to kill hacendados and their families. The radio announcer delivers the news to the Crespos:
On the hacienda of Don Ernesto Solis, the Indians, inflamed to passion against Senor Solis for his cruelties and abuses over the many years of their servitude, seized tonight the moment of their coming to power to raid the Solis house and to massacre all people within. (60)
As Doña Candita fears the worst, Pilár says, “No, no, mamacita! For cruelties and abuses, the radio says. We’ve not been cruel” (60). Here, Pilár does not condemn the violence; she implies that those who commit cruelty and abuse deserve punishment for their crimes. At the same time, her denial of her own family’s participation in the cruelty is absurd. These comments, therefore, sanction the violence – killing one’s oppressors is acceptable within the historical and moral universe Riggs creates – and seal Pilár’s fate.
The Spanish colonial world in the play, at least as represented in the contest over land, is approaching its end. Early upon their return to Yucatán, a neighbor compares the Crespo hacienda to the ruins at nearby Uxmal, and Trino repeats the comparison later in the play. The image of a colonial hacienda as similar to Mayan ruins foreshadows the end of colonial dominance, an end achieved by both friendship – between Trino and Beto – and violence. Trino tells Beto early in the play, “A little hate would have saved you” (31). Beto rejects hatred; instead, Trino and Beto work the fields and together help the government redistribute the land. As an employee of the government, Beto begins to take a role in a Mayan future that at this moment promises some self-government. Mayans on other plantations, however, express their outrage by killing the hacendados and their families. In the critical paradigm Justice presents in his literary history of the Cherokees, the different responses to colonial oppression taken by Beto and the neighboring Mayans are, respectively, the Beloved Path of accommodation and Chickamauga resistance. Indeed, the hope in the Beloved Path so conspicuously absent from The Cherokee Night appears as a powerful political principal in Pilár. A Chickamauga consciousness is also necessary, though, to bring this colonial world to its end. The revolution promises a good night for the Mayans and for the invaders another noche triste, the Spanish designation for the summer night in 1520 when the Mexicas drove them from Tenochtitlán. This vision of a liberated indigenous future resonates within a Cherokee national history in which Mexico is always a territory of hope.
Like Riggs, Will Rogers traveled frequently to Mexico in the 1930s, though Rogers’s travels also took him around the globe to Argentina, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and many European countries. In the correspondence from Europe, as in all his writings, Rogers identified himself as a Cherokee and his home as the Cherokee Nation and/or Indian Territory. He did so with enough frequency that his regular readers would have recognized these details as a significant part of his subject position and voice. Rogers moved to Hollywood in 1918 following a successful career in Wild West shows, vaudeville theater, and the Ziegfield Follies. James Smallwood and Steven Gragert, the editors of the collected writings of Will Rogers, explain that Rogers began his weekly feature in December 1922, and within a week the column went into syndication. Eventually, 600 newspapers published it until Rogers’s death in a plane crash on August 15, 1935. Approximately the same number of newspapers published his “Daily Telegrams” from 1926 to 1935. These shorter features were actually telegrams from Rogers to the Western Union office in the building that housed the New York Times. Through the newspapers, which dominated the era’s media, but also as a movie star and radio personality, Rogers became a daily presence in the lives of millions.
His assertions of a Cherokee identity and memories of his Cherokee national homeland are almost entirely celebratory and often nostalgic. In a weekly article from February 18, 1923, his observations on water management eventually turn to Oklahoma:
Now I am off my Senators from Oklahoma, especially Robert Owen who is part Cherokee like myself (and as proud of it as I am). Now I got names right there on my farm where I was born that are funny, too, and Owen don’t do a thing to get me a Harbor on the VERDIGRIS river at OOLAGAH in what used to be the District of COOWEESCOOWEE, (before we spoiled the best Territory in the World to make a State). (Smallwood and Gragert 1:27)
A discussion of the increasing popularity of football in a weekly article from September 29, 1929, entitled “Story of a Misspent Boyhood,” leads to a reflection on his childhood education at an all-Indian, one-room school. Rogers laments the school’s demise, which he argues was a consequence of its excessive focus on academics and failure to field a good football team. He takes the opportunity to remind readers that the school was in “the Cherokee Nation, (we had our own Government, and the name Oklahoma was as foreign to us as a Tooth Paste)” (Smallwood and Gragert 4:68). Other references in the weekly articles to his Cherokee identity and the Nation also include the addendum that he is proud of both.
This assertion of a Cherokee perspective continues throughout his writing, including the international correspondence he wrote for US periodicals, and demands that readers account for it. Rogers wrote Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President from Europe in 1926 to the Saturday Evening Post. Historian Andrew Denson establishes the Cherokee historical context for Rogers’s diplomacy. “The Cherokee National Council,” explains Denson,
began to appoint official emissaries to the United States in the 1820s, as pressure mounted for the tribe to move west. … [B]y the post-Civil War era, appointing delegates had become a standard part of each year’s business in the tribal government. (11)
Denson summarizes, “In essence, their job was to monitor the activities of the United States government” (11). Will Rogers fulfills this job description of a Cherokee diplomat in his daily and weekly newspaper columns, in which he constantly monitors the federal government for his audience. Rogers, like his official diplomatic forbears, was also a member of the Cherokee elite. He was not appointed by the Cherokee national government, though his unofficial status within this historical context makes him a self-made Cherokee diplomat as much as he is a self-made representative of the United States.
Rogers adopted the guise of a diplomat representing President Calvin Coolidge and the United States when he visited Europe from April to September 1926. In his letters, Rogers uses the code name WILLROG and reports on his diplomatic activities. His primary goal, he explains, is to help the United States recoup some of the loans it made to European nations during the Great War. As in his weekly articles and Daily Telegrams, Rogers identifies himself as a Cherokee from Indian Territory, and this identification shapes his diplomatic mission. As a first step in an ultimately successful attempt to get into the House of Commons, Rogers goes to the foreign press office in London and shows his press credentials for the Claremore Progress of Claremore, Oklahoma. Claremore then remains a key point of reference in his travels, including in his next book, There’s Not a Bathing Suit in Russia (1927). Rogers catalogs in Letters the relative merits of Claremore and Paris, for example, by comparing the Tiber unfavorably to the Grand or Verdigris Rivers, suggesting Claremore as a summer vacation spot, or preparing to meet Mussolini by giving himself the following pep talk: “Come on, Claremore, les see what Rome has got. I am going to treat this fellow like he was nobody but Hiram Johnson. Get your Lions ready for a foot race, in case I displease” (Rogers 129). The use of metonymy – the substitution of Claremore for Will Rogers – demonstrates the powerful association that Rogers experiences between himself and his hometown. In his role as a diplomat in Europe, he also continues to monitor the US federal government, and he repeatedly advises President Coolidge to tend only to the business of the United States. The Rogers doctrine of noninterference becomes a staple of his later journalism.
His readers might not have viewed him as a self-made Cherokee diplomat, but Rogers positions himself in this role. The difficulty he has in getting a passport without a birth certificate is a familiar satire of incompetent government bureaucracy, but his struggle is also embedded in a long history of American Indians trying to gain the recognition of US federal authorities. Rogers explains in the second letter,
You see, in the early days of the Indian Territory where I was born there was no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough. We generally took it for granted if you were there you must have at some time been born. (26)
This common sense that characterizes Indian Territory is nearly absent in the United States from which he departs and in the Europe where he arrives. Rogers was grateful, however, in this era of Prohibition, to have the Spanish Premier Miguel Primo de Rivera summon a servant to bring him a glass of sherry. Rogers describes the moment:
He explained to us that it was some stuff that Queen Isabella, I believe it was, had put these few bottles away for Columbus when he come in from a hard trip exploring. It was supposed to have some kind of spices in it, they said. I slipped my glass over to be reloaded. I says if I can just inveigle this old General out of a couple of more jolts of this Discovery medicine I will go out and hide America where no one can find it. (209)
Rogers’s wishful thinking for a reversal of European colonial history anticipates the nostalgia for the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory that becomes part of his regular newspaper columns. As he returns to the United States, Rogers comments that as a result of its unpopular status in the world, many of the other passengers are traveling incognito – and hiding liquor in their luggage. From the evidence of his later weekly articles and Daily Telegrams, Rogers likely wished that he was returning to the Cherokee Nation instead.
Further study of the writings of Oskison, Riggs, Rogers, and their contemporaries in tribal nation contexts will reveal a more vibrant era of politically engaged American Indian writing, particularly if we heed Robert Warrior’s call in The People and the Word to include nonfiction in our scholarship. Oskison positions the subjects of A Texas Titan: The Story of Sam Houston (1929) and Tecumseh and His Times (1938), for example, in Cherokee contexts. Choctaw author Todd Downing wrote a history of Mexico, The Mexican Earth (1940), and 10 detective novels set primarily in Mexico and the Mexico-Texas borderlands. Like Rogers, Downing publicly and continuously identified himself by tribal nation, Choctaw, rather than ethnically as Indian. Downing’s sense of his place in Choctaw history and his admiration for his father, a Choctaw political leader, inform the political commentary in his books on colonialism, settler-colonialism, US neocolonial intrusion in Mexico, and contemporary indigenous Mexican life. John Joseph Mathews’s self-identification as Chesho, of the Sky People and peace division of the Osage Nation, rather than as Hunkah, of the Earth People and war division, might fruitfully shape a reading of his memoir, Talking to the Moon (1945). Though tribal nation-specific literary criticism is not the only way to open these texts and this period to more rigorous study, it has moved the field beyond the often debilitating debates about identity and culture that until recently obscured rather than illuminated the era.
International Indigeneity
Many indigenous nations in the United States appear distinctly local from the perspective of the surrounding settler colonial nation. While local-tribal national histories and politics figure prominently in contemporary American Indian literary criticism, these critical practices do not foreclose US regional and national, transnational, hemispheric, and global modes of inquiry. During their travels, Oskison, Riggs, and Rogers were attentive to the histories and politics of the many places they visited, and they developed international, transnational, and global perspectives that as yet remain unexamined. These perspectives are rooted, though, in the Cherokee Nation contexts that shaped these authors. Attending to the interplay of tribal national, international, transnational, and global contexts will be a rewarding task for scholars of American Indian and American literatures.
These contexts contributed directly to D’Arcy McNickle’s 1954 novel Runner in the Sun. The novel tells the story of a young boy named Salt from a fictionalized southwestern cliff-dwelling community of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Salt returns to the community’s legendary homeland in the central valley of Mexico with the goal of finding a strain of corn that will revitalize his people and save them from a destructive political division. Runner does not appear to lend itself to a tribal nation-specific reading, though scholars have read it as a response to the post-World War II termination crisis in Indian country. As a founding member and leader of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), McNickle was a fierce opponent of the termination of the federal government’s responsibilities to tribal nations. Indeed, the United States planned to terminate his own tribal nation. The threat to Salt’s community, however, is internal.
Equally if not more important than this US federal Indian policy context was McNickle’s journey in 1940 to the First Inter-American Congress on Indian Life in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, Mexico. The Congress witnessed the meeting of prominent figures in federal Indian policy in Mexico and the United States, including Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier, as well as from the rest of the hemisphere. Lázaro Cárdenas, in the final months of his presidency, spoke there. John Joseph Mathews also attended, as did representatives from nine other tribal nations. Historian Paul Rosier observes,
The presence of representatives of nine Native American communities – including the Papago, the Jicarilla and San Carlos Apache, the Hopi, and three Pueblo groups – reinforced Collier’s message of promoting Indian sovereignty. Seventeen years after they had sent delegates east to Washington to protest the Bursum Bill, the Pueblo communities sent ambassadors from New Mexico south to Mexico to strengthen pan-Indianism across international borders. (82)
In addition to promoting Collier’s program and pan-Indianism, the Papago, Apache, Hopi, and Pueblo representatives likely had their own tribal nation-specific messages to promote. Identifying these messages would affirm their roles as tribal national diplomats as well as illuminate what use they, rather than Collier, hoped to make of the conference.
One task for literary critics is to identify what use American Indian writers might have made of this conference and other similar events. McNickle maintained his interest in indigenous peoples in Mexico and elsewhere in the hemisphere following the Congress. He served as the director of the National Indian Institute (NII), the US branch of the hemispheric organization formed at the Congress, and he published at least three articles in América Indígena, the organization’s journal, that focus primarily on termination. He also attended the second and fourth Inter-American Indian Institute Conferences in Cuzco, Peru, in 1949 and Guatemala City in 1959. They Came Here First (1949), his sweeping history of indigenous America, focuses primarily north of Mexico, but he emphasizes the trade routes that connected Mexico to the north and the origins of indigenous agriculture, especially maize, in Mexico.
McNickle’s consistent look to the indigenous south in this period suggests that we can read Salt’s journey to Mexico as a reimagined Inter-American Congress on Indian Life with indigenous people exclusively as actors. The US and Mexican bureaucrats and indigenistas that dominated the 1940 conference disappear in the novel in favor of a diverse, exclusively indigenous world connected through time and across space but also divided by language and custom. Salt diplomatically negotiates this world until he discovers in Mexico’s central valley a custom he cannot support: sacrifice. He helps a young woman escape sacrifice, and she returns with him to his home. Once there, his community politically and ceremonially incorporates Salt, the young woman, and the corn that she brought with her. Thus, while the geographic scope of the narrative is what contemporarily we would call international, intertribal national, or indigenous transnational, McNickle’s main concern is what that international experience contributes to the home community. In Runner, Salt’s journey demonstrates the urgent necessity of indigenous self-government. Indeed, self-government is the unremitting goal of every American Indian tribal nation.
References and Further Reading
Brooks, Lisa. “Turning the Looking Glass on King Philip’s War: Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative in the Network of Relations.” Unpublished manuscript.
Brown, Kirby. “Nationhood, Sovereignty & Citizenship in John Milton Oskison’s Black Jack Davy.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, forthcoming.
Conley, Robert. A Cherokee Encyclopedia. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.
Conley, Robert. The Cherokee Nation: A History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Denson, Andrew. Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture, 1830–1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Everett, Dianna. The Texas Cherokees: A People between Two Fires, 1819–1840. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
Fallaw, Ben. Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Foster, Tol. “Of One Blood: An Argument for Relations and Regionality in Native American Literary Studies.” In Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (pp. 265–302). Eds. Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.
Justice, Daniel Heath. Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr. “Utopian Dreams of the Cherokee Fullbloods: 1890–1934.” Journal of the West 10, no. 3 (July 1971): 404–27.
Maddox, Lucy. Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
McNickle, D’Arcy. Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize. 1954. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987.
“Ned Christie.” http://crt.cherokee.org/Culture/59/Page/default.aspx
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokees. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900.
Oskison, John M. Black Jack Davy. New York: D. Appleton, 1926.
Riggs, Lynn. The Year of Pilár. In Lynn Riggs, 4 Plays (pp. 1–72). New York: Samuel French, 1947.
Rogers, Will. Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President. Vol. 1. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1926.
Rosier, Paul C. Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Smallwood, James M., and Steven K. Gragert. Eds. Will Rogers’ Daily Telegrams: Volume 1. The Coolidge Years: 1926–1929. Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Press, 1978.
Smallwood, James M., and Steven K. Gragert. Eds. Will Rogers’ Daily Telegrams: Volume 4. The Roosevelt Years: 1933–1935. Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Press, 1979.
Starr, Emmet. History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore. Oklahoma City, OK: Warden Company, 1921.
Ware, Amy M. “Unexpected Cowboy, Unexpected Indian: The Case of Will Rogers.” Ethnohistory 56, no. 1 (2009): 1–34.
Warrior, Robert Allen. The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Weaver, Jace. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Communities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.